On Thursday, April 9, 2020, 09:58:37 a.m. CDT, Adolfo Mascarenhas <[email protected]> wrote: I have not been to Pyongyang or to Moscow. I am sure if I had gone for Kim the Elders Birthday Celebration....they would taken part of my working brain. I would no longer be a Goan but a Goaner.
---------------------------------------------------Doc,I love the last line. I got to Moscow for the first time in 1984. The "hotel" I stayed at had a Soviet Captain - in full uniform - distributing two cubes of sugar for the after dinner coffee. When I say coffee, I use the term liberally. The brew tasted more like boiled sawdust of a hardwood tree. Lunch was a quarter chicken boiled in water. No onions, no peas, no salt, nothing. The chicken portion was plucked out of a cauldron and dumped unceremoniously on your rice. Rice was plentiful, beloved Soviet potatoes not so. I was advised before arriving at the hotel to accept all the dark (unsweetened) chocolate I was offered and use the same to bribe the maids for favours. I later learnt that the biggest favour was to know what time hot water would be available on our floor. That was the most valuable info in Moscow in the middle of winter. As for Comrade Kim, he was my favorite dictator for the longest time - only because the propaganda dept in Tanzania insisted that there was no income tax in N. Korea and all state revenue was obtained form profits of State enterprises. Kim, the elder, was afraid of airplanes and I remember reading about him travelling 12,000 miles to Moscow in an armored train. The last carriage held donkeys - Kim's favourite animal - which he called "Celestial Cows." In the 1990s, I had a Korean bar/restaurant in my neighborhood in Toronto. As you know, Korean restaurants marinate all the meats and you have to cook what you order on the little grill on your table. Well, after I became real friendly with the restauranter, one fine night, he offered me "Celestial Cow." Remembering the Comrade, I accepted the meat and enjoyed my meal. I found out later that term was for another animal in Toronto. Hint: it was not bat meat either. One last thing, there is a bar in Dawson City, Yukon that has a challenge. They have a human toe pickled in whisky and the challenge is to drink a tot of the whisky. I am told that the tradition is more than a hundred years old now - and that they are on the fourth toe. The previous ones being accidentally (or maybe not) swallowed by patrons of the bar. Now, that is what I feel a non working brain does. Mervyn
